Tag Archive: Eric’s writing

A Dream of Impossible People 002 (FICTION)

read part 1 Sometimes when he slept, he would half wake. A menace would hang in the air. Something would be in the room with him, just on the edges of his vision, smeared into the shadows and watching him with burning eyes. He’d try to scream but couldn’t. He first saw one when he was 11 or 12. His eyes eased opening after a night awake wondering why it felt so strange to lay on your stomach. Just outside his bedroom door, a skeleton. Not a collection of bones strung together like you’d find in a classroom. No, this was a being. A thing. A malevolent entity. It watched him sleep. Observed him. Waited for its moment to do … what? He tried to…
Read more

A Dream of Impossible People 001 (FICTION)

He didn’t often shave. When he did, the mirror twisted and cracked, his face split between the shards, each of those infinite reflections thinking of infinite ways to die and why he was frightened by, and drawn to, each one of those endings. Instead, he drank coffee with no caffeine, because caffeine was just a rush of heartbeats and regrets, inky black, like so many nights caught in the grip of sleep paralysis, but in liquid form. From there, it was the choice: clean or unclean. Most days he was unclean. This suited him. Let the cover be the book. Let the book dictate the cover. And aren’t we all merely books made flesh? On this day it was no shave, coffee that did not…
Read more

The final stages of writing a book are always the most nerve-wracking

The last few hundred yards of a marathon are always the toughest. Well, okay, I’ve never run a marathon and doubt I could run more than a block and a half even if being chased by knife-wielding ducks, but you get my point*. I’m currently under contract with Rowman & Littlefield, and have been neck deep in writing a manuscript since last August, due to be delivered by May 1. (I’d love to be able to announce what it is, but have to wait until they release the information first.) I’m almost there. Being immersed in a big project is generally a must for me. Keeps me focused. Keeps me sane. And it’s gratifying seeing something come together piece by piece. The act of creation,…
Read more

Looking back at Neil Gaiman’s Sandman 28 years later – part 1 of 11

Eight years ago, Stephen Segal, then creative director at the legendary Weird Tales magazine, asked if he could use some modest writings I had been doing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman for a 20th anniversary retrospective he was putting together. Naturally, I said yes. What followed was a 11-part online series looking back at that remarkable body of work. The series wasn’t meant to be comprehensive or to uncover things you’d never seen before. Rather, it was meant to be a fun “rediscovery” of those now classic comics – so read these with that in mind. Weird Tales has undergone some changes over the years. Stephen is gone. They’ve faced some controversy. And their website was stripped down and rebuilt into a complete disaster. With it…
Read more